Traditionally, video decoders have been hardware-based. In other words, typical video decoders take the form of discrete, stand-alone devices dedicated for this purpose. With hardware decoder implementations, decoding streams of different formats usually requires a different chipset for each stream type and relatively lengthy firmware downloads. Multiple chipsets can prove to be very costly and making firmware changes in real-time becomes impractical.
Thus a need exists for a decoder arrangement that overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art.